Districts increasingly going back to architecture with windows

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, May 2, 2003

Clerestory windows allow students at Truman High School in Federal Way to enjoy more natural light.

Clerestory windows allow students at Truman High School in Federal Way to enjoy more natural light.

Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Natural lighting goes to the head of class in today's schools

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In school building design, what's old is new again.

The current buzzword is "daylighting," using sunlight to illuminate classrooms and other areas where children learn.

In a trend making its way into school buildings, architects are arranging windows to bathe interiors in natural light.

"It makes me feel more active," senior Mandi Zentzis, 19, said of the abundant natural light at her daylit school, Harry S Truman High in Federal Way. "It makes me get more work done."

That, architects say, is the idea. They point to a 1999 study correlating daylighting and improved student performance in Seattle, the Capistrano school district in Southern California and a third district in Colorado. Test-score data showed students at daylit schools learned as much as 26 percent faster than their peers studying under artificial light.

That research provided the underpinning for an architectural movement that also draws on intuition.

A hundred and more years ago, daylight was pretty much the only option for reliable illumination of schools. Classrooms in schools such as Seattle's B.F. Day Elementary, which was built and expanded from 1892 to 1916, were designed with high ceilings and a wall of windows admitting ample sunlight. Early electric lights or flickering gas fixtures supplemented the natural source.

As artificial lighting improved after 1900, ceilings dropped and rooms deepened, stretching farther back from the windows. But it was not until fluorescent lighting came into its own in the late 1950s that daylight became a secondary source of illumination. Some of the best examples of 20th-century daylit schools in Seattle, such as Wedgwood Elementary, Lafayette Elementary, Catherine Blaine K-8 and the Wilson Pacific building, date from the late 1940s and early '50s, when architects incorporated elevated roof sections with windows to spread natural light through the interior.

The proliferation of air conditioning, which is less efficient in airy, glassed-in spaces, joined with construction-budget concerns, skyrocketing energy costs and other design considerations to push many schools built in the past 40 years toward the antithesis of daylighting: the squat, windowless box.

Now the pendulum is swinging back -- if ponderously.

"The design of schools is greatly driven by institutional standards and those standards are very slow to change," said associate professor of architecture Joel Loveland, director of the daylighting lab at the University of Washington. "The client group is pretty risk-averse. A school is a very big investment for a community."

Federal Way school officials are on the bandwagon, according to the district's director of facility services, Rod Leland. They pushed for daylighting at Truman High, a 170-student alternative school that opened in March, and at Todd Beamer High School, opening in the fall.

The layout of Truman High is unconventional, with partitions dividing the warehouse-like space into loosely defined areas where students work on projects that are central to their studies. The school lacks air conditioning, and cooling comes from computer-controlled louvered vents.

Mahlum Architects of Seattle configured the $4 million school in two adjoining rectangles. Stretching the length of each rectangle, the middle third of the lofty roof is popped up several feet above the surrounding roof, and the walls of the elevated section are lined with rectangular clerestory windows. Ordinary windows in the outside walls bring in more natural light, supplemented by fluorescent-coil drop lights with blue-tinted reflectors.

The result is an interior washed evenly with full, soft light.

"It's really very bright inside," teacher Ross Brown said. "It's been really a good deal. I'm very pleased with the ambience."

The cloudy climate of the Pacific Northwest is ideal for daylighting, Heschong said. Direct sunlight is not conducive to learning because it produces too much glare and heat, she said. The best designs suffuse workspaces with indirect natural light, she said.

"It's like putting a sprinkler on the garden hose," she said. "You're taking daylight and you're distributing it gently."